About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Car bomb explodes near security directorate in Aleppo

(Sana).

An explosion, which the Syrian press agency Sana called a 'terrorist bomb', went off in the city of Aleppo on Sunday, killing a number of people. AP reported that Mohammed Saeed,
an Aleppo resident, said the a bomb exploded near the Political
Security Directorate in the city's central neighborhood of Suleimaniyeh.
He said the neighborhood has a large Christian population. The
Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
which relies on an activist network in Syria, also said it was a car
bomb. It said it had reports of dead and injured, but gave no numbers.
Three suicide bombings in the capital Damascus
on Saturday killed 27 people. The government blamed those on the
opposition, which it claims is made up of "terrorist" groups carrying
out a foreign conspiracy.